Doctor Who -The Pilot

Doctor Who is back. Peter Capaldi's final season kicked off with a new companion, a fairly rubbish alien lifeform, a robot other companion who has robot alopecia, apparently, and some bonus stuff thrown in for the fans. Well, it wouldn't be Easter without Easter eggs, eh?

The fan stuff included Daleks fighting Movellans (very Fourth Doctor); photos of River and of Susan on display in The Doctor's office (he has an office now, offices are cool); many sonic screwdrivers; montage of Bill's days echoing the montage of Rose's life before she met the Ninth Doctor in the first episode of the rebooted series; Leela running around naked in the background.

No, that last didn't happen but I wasn't sure you were paying attention.

Reboot. An interesting concept. Effectively Steven Moffat rebooted Doctor Who for the second time in five years in 2010 with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy meeting in her garden when she was a tiny. And now he's once again provided a season opener that could serve as a kicking off point for brand new fans. There is often a hint of the new every time a fresh companion hooks up with our favourite time travelling nutjob and through Bill we get to remind ourselves how out of this world the Doctor truly is. 

Only Bill isn't quite like most of the other newbies we've met down the years. No, I don't mean because of her ethnicity or sexual persuasion, those are just her being her. I mean the questions she asks that somehow nobody has quite got round to asking in 54 years of the show. Like, if he's from another planet why does the acronym which gives his time machine its name work in English, not Gallifreyan? No, you can't go back to the real first ever episode and say Susan came up with it because that ignores the fact that every Time Lord we've ever encountered refers to the machines as Tardis too. Tardises? Tardi? 

Bigger questions not yet answered mostly revolve around why Doctor Twelve is loitering with very obvious intent at St Luke's college. There is a vault he's guarding in the basement. What's in it, why is he guarding it and why did he locate it at the university (if indeed he did)? Will the answers to such questions have anything to do with Hartnell style cybermen or double incarnations of The Master/Missy later in the season? 

As I said, this week's alien was pretty rubbish, a sentient puddle that took on the form of a girl Bill fancied in such a way as to remind me of the scary aqueous life forms in The Waters of Mars from 2009. The aliens can often be lame when the season starts with a new companion being bedded in (Prisoner Zero was fairly shit, the Adipose were terrible, The Judoon looked scarier with their space helmets on). The big bads come later. The more we get to know a companion the more we truly feel the jeopardy their travels with The Doctor place them in.

For now we have a madman with a box, a robot Matt Lucas whose purpose has yet to be defined or justified and a crazy-haired new girl. And all of time and space. Good enough for me.

Doctor Who - The Return of Doctor Mysterio

The BBC are mean. They are cruel and heartless and they smell bad. They didn't commission a Doctor Who series for 2016. Of all the years to need a Doctor Who series, 2016 is up there with 1990 for definitely needing one (but for quite different reasons). The Doctor would have saved Prince and Alan Rickman and Bowie and, and, and...

Or Moffat is mean. Maybe he was busy with Sherlock. Someone was mean and they smell bad.

Hey ho. Christmas special which makes 2016 a not entirely devoid of Doctor Who year. Yay!

Matt Lucas is back from last year's Christmas special too. Ha, they didn't ask David Walliams back for more, did they? Lucas will be fun in the Tardis but I can't help wanting him to romp around it in his onesie, banging on drums and insisting his name is George Daws.

A real life superhero, in Doctor Who? Sort of. A real life comic book superhero style boy who eats a thing he shouldn't eat and becomes the Clark Kent of the nannying world. And fancies the woman he nannies for. Well, he nannies for her baby, not for her. She can burp herself.

And the splitty head freaks also return from last year's Christmas special. Lots of references to that episode if we're honest which allows for plenty of Doctory emotion. Capaldi can leap from terrible puns to manic activity to deep-eyed sadness in a heartbeat. As regenerations go he somehow manages to channel pretty much all of his previous incarnations yet remain entirely unique.

Forget the plot, it's a Christmas special (did I mention that?) and what matters most is that the spirit of an intergalactic pantomime is invoked and some snow happens at some point. What, no snow? The BBC are mean. They are cruel and heartless and they smell bad. They didn't let Moffat include snow in the budget. Possibly. Or he forgot to ask. He's mean.

Charity Wakefield is a lot more fun than her turn as Mary Boleyn in Wolf Hall led me to believe. Justin Chatwin didn't try to sell anyone drugs like he does in Orphan Black. And Moffat clearly hates hospitals as this is the second time he's made masked medical folk in scrubs get all silent and dangerous on us (The Power of Three, in case you were wondering - actually written by Chris Chibnall who will be taking over as show runner after next year's Christmas special so the surgeons can't relax even though I've got my facts wrong.)

Between now and next year's Yuletide offering is a brand new series coming in the Spring. With a new companion in Pearl Mackie and more Matt Lucas (see that, Walliams, they really like Lucas, don't they?). And I can't wait. So I'm not going to; let me just fix this chameleon circuit first then I'll pop ahead and see what Doctor Twelve is up to with Bill from the chippy.